Rhonda Scher
Rhonda Scher begins each day copying down Covid-19 case numbers. Over her English breakfast tea, she signs on to the Virginia Department of Health’s virus tracker and jots down statistics that show how close the pandemic is coming to her family.
March 23 was the day she got a wall calendar and began writing down the number of statewide cases. On that day there were 43. A week later, cases soared to 1,020. By the end of April, nearly 16,000 Virginians had tested positive for the coronavirus.
In June, the health department began tracking numbers by ZIP code. Scher started following the data for 22101 (her McLean neighborhood); 22201 in Arlington (where her older daughter lives with her husband and two young sons); and Ward 2 in the District (which Scher’s baby, now a lawyer, calls home).
It’s been roughly two years since the kids and grandkids prompted Scher and her husband, Mark, to relocate to Northern Virginia from Scarsdale, New York. “I wanted to watch my grandsons grow up and be part of my daughters’ lives,” Scher says.
Scarsdale borders New Rochelle, where an early Covid outbreak made national headlines and showed the U.S. how sneaky and virulent the novel coronavirus truly is.
But the move south now feels cruelly ironic, falling into the “human plans/God laughs” category. When Covid shut down Virginia, the Schers went months without seeing family. Twice-a-week babysitting came to a halt. The couple, in their 60s, now limits family contact to special occasions, like birthdays.
Scher gives a glum shrug when she thinks about how the virus wrecked her plans.
“Covid came,” she says. “What can I tell you?”
These days, instead of hosting sleepovers with her grandsons, Scher fills her empty time recording Covid cases in the small, precise penmanship she once used to write lesson plans during the 30 years she taught grade-school children.
“Writing down the numbers makes me feel in control,” she says, explaining what’s become her daily devotion. “I felt out of control when Covid started. This makes me feel more educated. I can see exactly what’s going on around me.”
Whenever Scher considers venturing outside of 22101, she’ll scan the ZIP code of her intended destination to see if the numbers there are rising, falling or staying the same. She remembers the time Mark insisted on going to Costco in Springfield, where cases were creeping up. “I got a migraine, I was so nervous,” she says.
Some might interpret her morning ritual as OCD-ish—a compulsion that pairs nicely with her mopping the floor whenever somebody steps inside wearing shoes, or her unease around clutter because, as she says, “I think everything has its place.”
But Mark, a psychiatrist, says his wife’s numbers thing isn’t really an obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s more of a fetish, or perhaps a response to a phobia. “It doesn’t take over her life,” he says.
Just her mornings. And, Scher says, there’s no end in sight.
“I’ll stop when I feel safe that my chances of contracting [Covid] are minimal,” she says. “Maybe I’ll stop when there’s a vaccine—though no vaccine will be 100% effective—or maybe when we stop wearing masks. I don’t know. But it probably won’t be for a long time.”
Total cases in Virginia have now surpassed 193,000.